FISL 9.0 - Talks
Monday Apr 28, 2008
So this year's FISL program appeared to be centered around community, web and scripting languages. On the first day I saw Josh Berkus' talk on database security. Which was very good, he's a great speaker and the subject is always an interesting one.
I had a presentation on OpenSolaris Testing on the second day, filling in for Jim Walker who couldn't make it to the event. I translated Jim's slide deck to BR-Pt and added a couple of pages introducing OpenSolaris, as I felt a good part of the audience would be new to the project.
The talk went smoothly, I started by asking how many people knew about OpenSolaris and got mixed responses. So I went on to talk about the basics of the project and the features that set it a part from other OS'es, the structure of the community and opensolaris.org, and the distributions (thanks to Thirtankar Das for the distro slide).
I talked about the Testing Community, TET, STF, the source browser and got to the demo part. Fortunately, the network connection came up just when I started to show the Self-Service Testing project and, a few slides later, the Test-Farm. People seemed interested in the infra-structure and how simple it is to submit a test run. Got a few questions about the automation software and the findleaks test afterwards.
 Josh Berkus' 'Safe Data is Happy Data' |  myself on OpenSolaris Testing |  Theodore Ts'o's EXT4 Talk |
Later on the same day I attended Theodore Ts'o's talk on the Linux kernel. It turned out to be a very informal Q&A, giving an opportunity to get his opinion on OpenSolaris. I didn't want to turn the thing into OpenSolaris at all, so I waited half way through the questions and asked him his opinion on the OpenSolaris Project and technologies like DTrace and ZFS. He gave a neutral and somewhat political answer with interesting considerations. Yesterday I found out that he recently expressed some critics about the project on his blog, which was in part responsible for a very interesting conversation on the OpenSolaris Advocacy alias over the last couple of days.
On the last day I attended another talk by Ts'o on the EXT4 file system, which IIRC will emerge early next year. I'm far from an EXT# expert, but I had the impression that it is mainly a follow up to EXT3 that extends bit depth ona few key fields. None of the new features drew my attention - maybe lazy write backs, but that's not really new, is it (honest question) ?
Over all I wish there were more kernel and performance related talks, so I'll definitely submit a couple of presentations for next year's. I'm pretty sure there are a good amount of people interested in OS' kernels in that part of the world.
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